I’m not sure if you’d categorize this under “scaling actually hitting a wall” but the main possibility that feels relevant in my mind is that progress simply is incremental in this case, as a fact about the world, rather than being a strategic choice on behalf of OpenAI. When underlying progress is itself incremental, it makes sense to release frequent small updates. This is common in the software industry, and would not at all be surprising if what’s often true for most software development holds for OpenAI as well.
(Though I also expect GPT-5 to be medium-sized jump, once it comes out.)
I’m not sure if you’d categorize this under “scaling actually hitting a wall” but the main possibility that feels relevant in my mind is that progress simply is incremental in this case, as a fact about the world, rather than being a strategic choice on behalf of OpenAI. When underlying progress is itself incremental, it makes sense to release frequent small updates. This is common in the software industry, and would not at all be surprising if what’s often true for most software development holds for OpenAI as well.
(Though I also expect GPT-5 to be medium-sized jump, once it comes out.)